A Thinking Reed

  • On weekday vegetarians, flexitarians, and other part-timers

    A while back I wrote a post about the debate between vegetarians and “conscientious omnivores.” I proposed that this debate was largely irrelevant to the bigger problems that characterize the standard American diet: [T]his is an extremely specialized debate among a very tiny segment of the population. The vast majority of the meat consumed in…

  • Friday Metal: High on Fire, “Rumors of War”

  • Summary thoughts on process theology

    Last night I finished Cobb and Griffin’s introduction to process theology, so I wanted to get some thoughts down on the general Whiteheadian perspective. I think the expanded name sometimes used – process-relational theology – is actually more helpful because both elements, process and relation, are key to understanding what this school of thought is…

  • Summer reading list update

    Well, we still have over a month of summer left, calendar-wise anyway. Since my last update I finished Moby-Dick and read the better part of a collection of critical essays. I finished Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas and decided to follow up with his Religion in the Making. As a supplement to all this…

  • Whitehead on theological revisionism

    I don’t know why I’ve suddenly been interested in reading Whitehead, but after Adventures of Ideas I turned to an earlier work–Religion in the Making. Here you can see the germs of a “Whiteheadian” doctrine of God, particularly in his critique of traditional notions of omnipotence and transcendence: This worship of glory arising from power…

  • What would “conservative” marriage look like?

    “Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind. The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe.” — Alfred North Whitehead As more and more people come to support same-sex marriage, social conservatives and other opponents of marriage equality have been driven to reject the fundamental premise of modern marriage. This…

  • Whitehead on the task of theology

    In his book Adventures of Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead criticizes “liberal clergy and laymen” of the 18th and 19th centuries for rejecting systematic theology. The problem with the old theology wasn’t its intellectual or systematic character, Whitehead says, but its insistence on “dogmatic finality.” Metaphysics–or systematic, rational thought about the universe rooted in our deepest…

  • Death of the seas

    The WaPo ran a good review this Sunday of two books on the slow-motion environmental catastrophe taking place in the earth’s oceans.

  • If you’re looking for substantive blogging

    …you haven’t been finding it here, have you? But Marvin‘s been on a tear lately. Also, be sure to check out Jeremy‘s series on Catholic Social Teaching.

  • Friday Metal: Napalm Death, “On the Brink of Extinction”

    Downloaded their latest album this week and this is my favorite song so far.